The Robotis TurtleBot3

The Turtlebot3 looks sweet! It is controlled with a Raspberry Pi and OPENCR. It also comes with a 360 LIDAR sensor and it is a open sourced robot! I should be getting mine in a few weeks and I can not wait!

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

Robotis is unveiling the Turtlebot3 at ICRA 2017 this week and has posted lots of videos about their robot on their youtube channel. So you know what their plans and directions are for their Turtlebot platform. It is a open platform robot using ROS. You can also start buying their robot next week!

Yes, the Robotis platform is design to be modded and to share your ideas to improve it!

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

I saw the turtlebot2 at the robot block party last month. It looked great!
The arm is nice for something that moves around, because it lets you have more agency.
It's based on Intel CPU tech, which is great for traditional ROS work, but not as fast for the new-fangled machine learning stuff.
(Of course, it's also open/hackable, and you can add whatever you want!)

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

As I mentioned looks like the Trossen setup could be a fun setup.

The turtlebot 3 initial configurations, looks like it has two main configurations.
a) Burger: with their own robotis board ARM M7 and RPI3
b) Waffle: with same controller M7 board with Intel Joule board processor.

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

As I mentioned, I am sort of on the fence here on picking up one of these or one of the Trossen new ones.

Hopefully someone from Trossen will chime in at some point (either on Forum) or Blog or... and convince me and hopefully many others to jump on board!

But I am wondering in the mean time if I would be just as well served at least initially if I rolled my own from mostly parts I already have.
Probably would not be as cute as the new Turtlebot3 burger, but could do something like:

Lynxmotion Tri-track (or rover): both have at least two motors with encoders
Roboclaw to control the motors.
Processor: RP3 or Odroid or UP
An IMU: I have a couple different options
Maybe Teensy for something
Lidar Lite (need to put Teensy 2 back in it)

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

The kobuki (Turtlebot 2/2i/etc.) already has a rather large userbase and is a fully functional robot vacuum on its own. That also means it has a lot of extra stuff not really required by a small robot, which the Turtlebot 3 does away with. If you are not planning for the robot to do anything other than roam around for education and/or perform navigation/mapping experiments, then the Turtlebot 3 is the cheaper, smaller choice. If you want it to interact with much of its environment, then the Turtlebot 2/2i is still the better choice because of its large base and payload. Not sure how stable the upper levels of the 2i are with the plastic standoffs instead of aluminum, but easy enough to upgrade to larger diameter standoffs and thicker plates if needed to decrease wobbling.

I expect there will be a 2i upgrade kit to let existing kobuki owners to cleanly upgrade to the 2i without buying a new kobuki, which contributes quite a bit to the pricetag.

As for roll-your-own, that is one of the reasons I have been working on my cycloidal gearbox and brushless controller stack. Climbing steps can be accomplished with a rocker-bogie configuration, but might be a bit big and quite tall.

edit again: the tri-star wheel configuration is another option for climbing stairs. It can be used in either two or four wheel-carrier drive to safely climb stairs, depending on whether the rotation of the wheel-carrier is actively or passively controlled, respectively. Thinking two wheel-carrier tri-star was used in an episode of GITS:SAC for a blind child in a wheelchair to climb stairs, and there was an actual wheelchair product using a two wheel-carrier dual-star version (two wheels per carrier, one carrier per side, all actively controlled) available a several years ago before being discontinued. It was never available as a robot base because it had gone through the entire process to be classified as medical equipment, so could not be sold for other purposes without risking the medical equipment classification.

Re: The Robotis TurtleBot3

Thanks Tican,

Again lots to think about.

As you mentioned the Kobuki is derived from a full vacuum cleaner system (My assumption is that is not part of this base?), but does some with some interesting and useful sensors, which I believe includes: 3 bumper switches, 3 cliff sensors (IR?) and 2 wheel drop sensors.

What is interesting in the comparisons though is I am not sure I believe specs... Example the Turtlebot 2i says it has a payload of 2KG or 1KG with arm. The T3's Burger says 15KG and Waffle says 30KG. As you mentioned it is a larger platform 351.5mm diameter where the Burger is only 138x178 and the waffle is 281x306. But I wonder with some of these that use casters, how well they work going over different surfaces. Example my office is carpet, but I have a rug over most of it, with tassel, will any of these have issues with it.

Again more fun stuff to think about. May have to look into some of the other wheel configurations.